How briefly absurd it all really is.

There's glass between us.

I wouldn't mind
some jazz and wine
and to watch you masturbate while
bathed in
moonlight.

Simple pleasures
come about simply
and such a sight would suit me
fine.

As your fingers glide
over the curves
of your instrument I
can almost taste the melody.

And when
suddenly
you begin to sing,
the notes that come,
for me,
are
magic.

I wonder what it feels like
to lie beneath your weight
to feel all of it
dead center
heavy and full
pressing down and
impenetrably dark.

I have to be honest,
I don't seem to collect sober luggage.

Every day these contemplations
appear more and more as farse
and less and less as
prose.

Glory is in the striving,
in the conquering of the self.

We all walk in darkness
but
some of us
like it
there.

Not I.

I set fire to the
world.

It is not alive in the violence babe
it is not spun out of plastic packages
or inside the chamber of burnt-honey bottles
it isn't in the dope eyes of a molly warmed soul
or three sets of naked limbs
entwined.

It is in the repetition of morning,
in the ancient strength of rising again
and continuing forward bravely
the holy burden of man.

It is in shouldering the necessary mission of God.

Its in you growing up and meaning well
but never finding the time

It's the poignant moment as
you think you may hear
a song that once played over our Carolina
season.

One day we'll meet in heaven as strangers

I'll nod and
you'll smile
and the sun will rise
to vanquish
the agony of
night.

If I reached out before me
and tore back the layers
of everything that is held so dear:
every construct
every platitude
every social convention
every concept of structure and form
every plan
every foolish notion of self-emergence

I'd arrive with alacrity
in the place where I stood.

It is an infinite elongation,
stars on a common fabric,
a seven-point-seven billion bodied
hive mind
disjointed and
uncomfortably confused.

Beacons of information
with eye and nose
chattering the status of being
over wires
over wind
relaying an unknown position to
a centralized unseen
command.

I?
I am the fist smashing the mouth of an old man
I am the final moments of an endless road
I gasp for breath just after the womb
I am the rattle and a wrinkled hand gone slack.

This is the ubiquitous ache of isolation and
this finite separation from the whole is
agony.

It is entirely possible

that I was no great lover

and the whole thing was my fault.

Cradled in your hands
I picture the gentle slope of your cheek
and your hair falls down around me like a dark forest thickly.
There is childlight in your eye
and your lips melt into cinnamon
and I love you.
I endlessly love you.
But you're lightning in a bottle
and you've yet to strike out,
as I know you will,
with wrath
with lust
with the last fleeting fire of fallen down youth.

Still,
spread your arms and I'll embrace you
spread your legs and I'll kneel to taste you.

We'll always have that summer,
while we drift away in ceaseless
fall.

Elegy Repeats Itself

I feel foolish for how often I grieve my innocence,
the better days behind me now
that its darkly off to war.
All those nights before the self inflicted slaughter -
I will have no children
I will have no wife.

The order of that lament is telling.

I long to disappear into quiet,
no theatrics
no farewell
just a whisper on a westbound breeze
leaving the faintest inclination
in the dark corners of your mind.
You might have known a man once
but you cannot seem to picture him
and you cannot seem to place him,
but you're sure they were there

...weren't they?

For C

I sip the cup of blackness
and drink in the nothing of night
all around me sail the flights of words
set aloft from your callow
lips.

I am beloved,
I feel alive.

You've seen me

in the downs
in the depths -
I begged you once
for
sin and
you, without judgement, held
me.

Now I tuck away a photo of you
in a billfold in my pocket.

A passenger beside me daily,
we navigate the world together
side by side
and I tenderly call you
friend.

In a brief moment of twilight I thought
about how lovely it would be to dance again
across a marble face in black dress shoes
with you -
your ivory skin in counterpoint
to a dress crimson red,
a fine complement for our mutually complicit
infidelity.

In the end it came to me
exactly what I deserved:
the entirety of
you.

Manhattans and maraschinos
how alluring was your face.

Manhattans and maraschinos
how sweet the devil tastes.

I didn't have the water
for the drought of your soul.
I was a bud of you
thirsting from the same vine and
cursing with you the calamity
of the vile injustice of being.

Nature abhors the abomination of imbalance
and you needed me to tell you that you did well
when it was beyond the pale
of a skinny and quiet child
too sensitive for screaming
and leather belts that cracked against
his
spine.

So now you sit in twilight
aging slightly left of center and grace
and I promise to look after your body
and keep four walls for
aging
bones.

I would have loved to hear you were proud
when it mattered
but you always came first,
and you never showed me anything
because no one ever showed you
and the sins of fathers fall undeserved to sons
and the ghost of their failures
will haunt me both now
and
forevermore.

I know where you are lover
unjustly caged in, young lioness,
alone without need
of champion
or cub.
Before you stands the mountain
inside you lies
the
sea.
What to do with all that fire,
burn the effigy?
Alight the bridge?
Abscond to the Isle,
cut your hair and
change your name?
I say run, siren,
go mad with womanhood,
shout into the silent depths
pull the stars into your stomach
and the sky across your eyes.
They
will
know
you
were
here.
From dust we came and
to dust we'll go
give em' hell kid
in
between.
Give it all away and
and when you're done
I'll have a shoulder for your burden
and a place
for your weary
head.

I only went there to find you,
I pushed the button and now I wait
on your arms,
and your legs,
and the skin between
your thighs.

I want to tell you these lines in staged drama
and feel your honeysuckle tongue
run over my teeth
playing the part even
though they call
cut.

Remember when we laid our heads
on the pillowcase one-eyed sideways
after all that drinking out on
your front
porch?

I wish that I could remember everything
I said there
that made you look at me
like
that.

I want to say it again
now
and mean it.

I want to say it again,
now that I'm
well.

It's a bitter irony
that now I'm ready for you
when I'll most likely never
see you
again.

Touched by a man
touched by the voice of a man
with heartbreak hands and
a voice like the sound of syrup
pooling slowly
at the base of a
jar.
A voice that filled the room around us
with the poetry of regret
and the effervescent joy of
imagined
love.

In that moment,
I saw God pulling back
the
veil.

The curl of our toes on the floorboards
tumbling down dark drug-dripped hallways
swaying and spinning
my hands shook with violence so
you held the bag in your
peaceful palm.

On the first night I loved you
we took off our clothes
and you gently led me to the shower,
a sexless ceremony,
and in an instant I
felt
alright.

(How did you know?)

I came upon you broken
a dozen years atop your age.
You taught me the timeless
and neatly arranged the stars,
pulling a blanket of dark
over an otherwise unremarkable Raleigh sky.

You were home to so many:
who had non,e
who needed one,
who missed one,
who had never had one yet.

On a quiet corner where
the Carolina Pine met the Oak,
there was always a porch light
and an open door

where everyone loved you honestly
and they were always glad
you
came.

Somewhere I cannot see
is every word I'll ever need.

Somewhere I've never been
is the last place I'll ever go.

Somewhere I'm at last alive and
somewhere I died long ago.

Somewhere is adoration while
mostly there is hate.

Somewhere it is peaceful,
somewhere is equanimity.

Somewhere there is God and
we will shake hands like gentlemen.

I'll tell Him that I'm sorry
and He'll tell me
why.

Back and forth and
up and down.

Visions of us as broken glass
crack-split surface but still recognizable
shards of us on the ceiling
shards of us on the floor.

Back and forth and
up and down.

In a long decade of poverty
I could not rub two nickels together
to make one
blessed
dime.

Yet my bed stayed quite warm
and
good work was done between and about
the
sheets.

There were times of bounty,
in an obliquely spiritual sense,
like smoking gifted cigarettes
and drinking mud brown bottles
on the porch with the riffraff
at three am.

Along the outer edge
of the circling drain
there is a certain frivolity:
decks of cards
pool cues and
beanbags.

All good things,

you know.

Now its the noon-day sun
and wistful remembrances
of vagabond evenings with
no harm done.

You can't go home
again.

I can hear your reply when
I say that I still just don't get it,
"There is nothing to get and
even if there was why
would you
want
to?"

A strong argument.

Oh to win back yesterday,
to reclaim lost time and
retire to the islands.

To stop wearing clothes
and pound sand suntanned,
stand bare before the elements and
be my very own
lighthouse.

Lately,
I grow tired of all this

humanity

the throngs
the masses
these friends
Romans
countrymen

caged in this charade
of taxes and neckties
Lord how we toil
on this
mortal
coil.

I want to
feel it
when the sun goes down and
your legs open the length
of a heron's wings,
when dew falls upon the vine and
the air bears the flavor of
honeysuckle
citrus.

How much longer can we
and the Earth around us
go on?

Out of the void we came
to plunder and pave
when all around us
was such awe inspiring
magic.

A Eulogy For All The Wide-Eyed Darlings and Dreamers (For The Ghosts Of 1533 S. Main)

Clever line
Clever line
Clever line
Clever line
point.

Clever line
Clever line
Clever line
Clever line
point.

Clever line
Clever line
Clever line
Clever line
point.

Bittersweet wisecrack.

Poignant and heartbreaking
remark.

The only thing worth talking about is how nothing is worth talking about.

I remember you sitting in a chair
just inside the hallway,
which in itself was not very significant,
save for the fact that it happened to be
the same place I had just run my tongue
along the length of your young, yawning ass
about an hour or two earlier when
we had sex in the dark
as the sirens rang
on Glenwood.

You sat there
more girl than woman
dreaming of unknown lovers
much younger than I
who burned for adventure,
and starlight over
the crowded streets of
Prague and
Paris.

But you were still cunning enough
to trade warm pussy for a hot meal
and I say that without malice
or
disdain.

A young girl gets it where she can
by shaking what she will
with all the power that young girls are
rightfully
given.

As you let me down gently
I lovingly said,

"As you go through life
you'll find,
sadly,
the good ones are few
and far
between."

Wherever you are tonight
I genuinely hope

that you're off somewhere with
one or two of the good
ones.

Man alive you're a house on fire.

I pace the room
caged
stretching the fibers along my spine
my hands cover my face
please
not again.

Clawing at darkness
for a shred of the light
silent and infinite miles of burden
drowning under the weight of death and

isolation.

I don't like to discuss luck
it cheapens a thing as if it could belong to anyone,
that it just hangs there without holy ordination
and is just as happy to give itself to the wicked
as it is to be cherished by the good.

You use luck to describe the flip of a coin
or the procession of cards as they lie upon the table
things that have no substance or meaning
and are wisps of smoke in the vapid service of chance.

Therefore,

that I know the scent of your skin is hardly the offspring of luck.

When the absence of heaven was given its light
and life burst forth among the infinite wonder
our spirits held tight their celestial hands
swearing binding oaths to seek one another for eternity
no matter the inches, yards, or years it may take.

We fought with abandon
through the melee of possibility and chance
calling out tirelessly
until the mountains and the valleys
rang with the resonance
and we arrived just south of

here.

Here where in spite of miles
I feel your fingers.

I hear your voice.

I taste your lips.

My only desire
is to see you live happily.

Until we slip the covetous grasp of earth
and are once more bright
in the eyes of
God.

Deux Cent

200.

I started writing things down ten years ago
because some part of me,
some admittedly overly dramatic and overly sensitive part of me,
needs to be indulged so I don't descend into an emotional madness
and do something patently
absurd.

I don't walk around otherwise
like the weight of the world hangs
heavily on me,
I am really rather jovial
I take care of myself
watch what I eat
notice the birds in the sky
feel moved by the miracle of genuine affection
and
clean the toilet weekly.

But when it gets quiet
and its just you and me,
I feel like I have to be honest.

I'm still waiting for that honesty to honestly manifest.

I suppose that, honestly, I'm not okay.
But I know that is hardly unique.
How can anyone be okay as we barrel toward inescapable
and certain
death?

In light of that knowledge,

things could be much
much
worse.

Inching toward redemption
there is not blood enough
to satisfy the gaping maw
of the judge, his jury, and your
executioner.

We'll have your head for your humanity/
know your place/
we're sworn to uphold the highest standards/
be ashamed/

Once we kill everything that came before us
there will be rest.
When all individuality is extinguished
there will be peace.

One day we are going to sell our souls for safety.

One day we'll forget
every song we ever
wrote.

Lurching from one travesty to another
finding the whole exercise of daily life
a vain and hollow pursuit,
our idols begin to crumble
society is in no way the natural habitat
for the animal of
man.

The sky is a miracle
the dirt is our mother
death is our birthright
and we are gods of chaos.

We have earned this,
our imminent ruin.

The current state of the kingdom is tactile misery.

Misery after all these years of trying.

No matter how far the hero travels
his demons are never far behind.

The walls around me are high
and there is razor wire like a crown of thorns
and guards stand at the ready in their towers
with standing orders to shoot
anything that moves
on sight.

A self imposed incarceration?
Perhaps,
in the absence of alcohol
not even the wind gets through.
There is nothing to soften the edges
wheels with no grease,
a hardly surprising exile -
Napoleon's ghost in Elba and
in St. Helena
his
bones

In clarity I've discovered
there is not much poetry in the curse of man,
in the constant rising
and lying down,
the animal necessity of sustenance
and its unsavory yet inevitable
expulsion.

We may all have different talents
but we're all experts in
the ancient art of
crap.

In the dark there are whispers,
in the smoke there is
a timbre to your voice
and the walls reverberate with gunfire as
I am relieved of all duties
pertaining to
you.

Somewhere a raven raises its midnight head
and the moon splits itself in two
an angel falls from grace to an untimely death
and the sea hides its face
from the plum purple
sky.

Another tragedy for the story of time
another casualty in an intangible war
that has claimed more than Caesar or
Alexander combined
and will again without remorse
on and on
into eternity.

Did you hear it?

Another one just hit the floor.

Blood-soaked and cold,
he never even saw it coming.

Press your palm into mine
brand me with your vulnerability and
your violence

your ugly and your vengeful
your rancor and your rust.

Let's make plans the length of our arm
and see where the sky slides below the horizon
bending the stars beneath the earth
to melt into the formless void
their fading light dripping slowly
through god's epochal fingers.

Elbow to elbow
wrist to wrist
Our bones bear witness to the truth of our blood.

If a single inch of skin
whispers my name
send
word.

I'll keep a light on.

You.

You're a butterfly in a child's hands

you're a firefly dancing on stardust

you're a secret whispered into tin cans

you're a memory over warm coffee

of a cold day in fall.


You are a tan coat

you're the color red

you're an explosion in the sky

you're the Madonna, thumb out, hitchhiking.


You're a windowsill

you're a silhouette

you're split ends

you're bleach damaged roots

you're a plate of nachos

you're a coffee table conquered by cats

you're a drunken painting

lost to time.


You're a tunnel

you're a gate

you're so popular

you're a nightmare

you're a red wine hangover

you're rose colored glasses

you're my best friend

you're my worst enemy

you're art alive kinetic

a contortionist riding on a gymnast

you're an afterthought

you're a wet dream.


Tonight its you
you you you
and from the future of
your past I'm
wishing you well,


having a great summer -

wish you were

here.

Love in the 21st century

I want to paint your body
with expectations -
attempt to own what isn't mine,
plot your course and
man your rudder.

I want to sip jealousy from
an insecure cup
spit every word you say
later on
back into your face with prejudice.

I want to build a silent case against you
noting every slight while I smile and nod,
then,
when the house is burning,
throw the file,
and you,
on the fire.

How odd that we would deign to tell
another who is good and
who is off limits;
that we would sacrifice our entire lives for
salt and semen
and the insincere ghost of
fleeting
contentment.

As for you,
have your lies
your lie down
and lay about
under lemon scented linens on a Sunday morning,
swear oaths you'll never keep
and dream of futures
that will never
come.

I'll keep watch
and listen for your call:
hysterical, drunk, and broken,
saying its over
and this time
its for
good.

No one writes and the telephone is a paperweight

You tell me all about what luck you have
to have all these hearts surround you,
to be
unaware of solitude,
touched and handled,
never crushed by quiet,
always a full house with matching
heart.

I hope it never ends.

Time,
racing ever onward,
shakes loose the tepid grip
of lukewarm hearts.
There aren't many who have the fortitude
to bear your burden with you
and,
anyway,
why should they?

I used to dream of forever before I stopped believing,
but the human heart just doesn't have room
for anything but adoration for its host.

I won't pretend I'm different.

If I martyr myself to art maybe
they'll give me another shot.

Then I'll start over.

I'll eat all my vegetables,
letter in High School,
get the girl,
become a captain of industry
and run
for office.

I'll be a really great guy and
everyone will
know my
name.

How lovely it would be
to sleep the unending sleep.

When we were children we were blameless.
Our drama was the stuff of skinned knees
and through the day we were princes and,
after dark,
thieves.

Later, we learned our place.

They gave us our list of requirements -
rules
for this or that,
and they branded us criminal, troubled, and
unfit to serve.

They put us in categories and typed our names into databases
with our sins to forever chase us
down to the gates of
hell.

All men are created equal yet
are destined to be unequally judged.

Here is my back
and these are my knees.

I'm down to just one arm and right ankle,
but I'll hand them over too
for another overpriced gadget
and a dozen more channels.

I don't trust nostalgia.

Were you as pink as I remember?
I don't see how that matters
anymore.

I don't have a single memory of you
sitting across from me
making plans.
Just naked flesh
warm and wet -
drinking you in like I'd never seen
water
mouth on your clit like
I'd never had
food.

Its not often you see such rapture.

Your eyes would roll back like
there was a secret in your skull,
two solids in the corner pockets.

In a photo finish you
are the second best I ever had.

But don't worry about the other one
she was a godless animal.

There is a pond behind my building
and I watch the rearing
of a third generation of water fowl and
I like it very much.

I wake up each day and
the lawn is manicured and the sky is blue
and
I like that too.

I have a full closet of fabrics
and plenty of shoes.
I take each pair out walking and
I like them.

I put new strings on my guitar
and they vibrate and sing
and the mood is mellow
and I like it.

I eat food that I cook
and I'm not half bad.
I make dinner for my family
they eat it and say,
"We like it."

There are fresh tomatoes in the sun.
The farmer's daughters gather plump, red strawberries.
The men in the fields cut asparagus stalks
sold four dollars for the bunch.

These days are dull,
nothing is consumed by fire.
In this impermanent tranquility
I am
satisfied.

Frescoes on your headboard
the sky spreads wide to greet you
your purple linen life
reclining
on the skin of starlight.

Cinematic fashion
how lovely is your neckline,
if all of life was thread you'd
stitch my lips onto your collarbone.

Here is an afternoon Parisian
fit for lovers and Renoir
an intoxicating melody ignites the air
the flowers around us melt into a kaleidoscopic cacophony.

If fate were to strike me blind,
no matter,
I've seen:
the ebullient sun,
azure sky,
and your warm
and easy
smile.

Each one of us a symphony for no one.

How deep each individual cut
how violent the fibrous tears
blood running crimson on the altar
filling our ears,
flooding our mouths,
you drowning in me drowning
in you.

Salt, fat, acid, and heat
jawbones snapping and cracking
gnawing on flesh and blubber
the insatiable feasting of the amoral
on the hopeful, the sensitive,
the vulnerable, and the
weak.

Diving down into the abyss,
seven billion eyes
sinking ever further below hell's horizon
trying to find the perfect filter
and humming their country's anthem

hoping to be the first to show the devil
the error of
his
ways.

If you're still mine in the morning
kiss me twice before you go,
I won't ask you to lie back
down.

Leave me naked in the sheetscape
sex-drunk morning sunlight through the panes
scents of you on my pillows and arms
green on grass
blue on sky.

Coffee and breakfast hot
tree limbs asway
colors fully colored
feet inches from the ground.

The walls know it.

The ceilings saw it.

The heavens rejoice:
you were
here.

I arrive home and undress in the dark
take off yesterday
take off today.

Life as
a carry on,
a one paragraph manifesto,
a party of one.

All past is poison
make peace and move on.
Never forget to
never remember
you never had it like you think.

I forgive them all,
I forgive myself,
I won't always be recalled
but I'll be forever
felt.

Look down at your hands
they held me once.

Its quiet up here as
the city burns
my past on fire behind me.

Don't look for me
I'm gone.
Don't call me
I won't answer.

Every day I'll be forgetting you
you never made me better.

I will not be there
to see any of
your futures.

I was a mirage
a stranger
a shadow.

You ruined me (took everything)
now you can keep it all.

I don't love your skies
I don't love your streets
I don't love you
anymore.

I don't love your skies
I don't love your streets
I don't love you
anymore.

Why ever should you know me?

Today is unlike yesterday,
I am something new.

Similar in skin and bone
yet
differing in hue.

Whatever it was is
wherever it went and
whomever was there has
gone.

The things I thought I wanted once
were demons all along.

As born we are,
so in death we'll be.
Likewise,
so the length
between.

A fleeting glance
a stolen kiss
none does this moment
mean.

So on our race toward epitaphs
a moment's mark is all we're given.

As our brevity,
weighs heavily,
on our tragic souls
imprisoned.

Each decade brings death.

The decay of all foundation of identity -
one minute prince,
next,
pauper.

Through a medicated haze I find
that another death has come to me,
everything I thought I knew was mostly
false,
lost in a swell of
well wishes and
the pavement of
good,
albeit misguided,
intentions.

So there stands our hero,
see him in my hands
and feel him in my stomach
his heart,
mirroring mine,
both breaks and beats
with the clarity of this consuming revelation:

I have finally become
totally and irrevocably
alone.

So let us march toward heaven
or the mouth of hell
whatever awaits the wounded
after breath becomes breeze
and body
embers.


There is nothing to mourn
just a lingering sense of loss
that suffocates my nostalgic
soul and
leaves me defeated
in an almost blanket of sadistic
satisfaction.

"Of course" I say to myself,
as this is obviously how it is for man
doomed to suffer under his own aspirations
and to inevitably drown in his crippling limitation
for the bonds of flesh are finite,
a prison for the breath of
God.

The farce of our free will is
that even though we may increase our situation
through self aggrandizement or financial gain
we
as one accord
are yoked together by the laws of inevitability
to mourn all passing
of our history,
our children,
ourselves.

For know this:
none if it is ours
and we belong to something higher
that supersedes us
and as agents we are sent
to fulfill our hidden purpose
pawn-like more than powerful
always living in the similarity that

sometimes we are in the midst of,

or simply in between

tragedy.

Never,
despite our best efforts
are we really
ever on sure footing.

We will never
ever see
solid
ground.

I think that if I hit it big I'd
live it all over again.
The same empty rooms in the same empty southern towns
out of place and pitiful,
head full of spirits,
window shopping graves.

Lying fetal,
cheek pressed to the floorboards
death running up the walls
death running up my spine
playing chess with anguish
delaying endless days of
inconsolable
sobbing.

I'd bury my face in THAT blood bathed grass
searching for a final taste of you,
eyeing remnant shards and metals
darkly willing the same evisceration.

Its been the same grey sky since
that day in May. I'll find where they laid you to
feel my fingers worm in the dirt
that swallows you like a serpent
routine and callous.

This is my penance for survival,
driving needles into my eyes and
fire into my mouth,
my guts in flames
shouting the devil
no one remembers
but I do,
I do,
I
do.

There's always so much mundanity
and somehow you slowly begin to long for it.

Leather jacket in a coffee shop,
earth tone carpet and candlelight,
gratitude of morning, cold brewed coffee
in a porcelain mug -
robin's egg
blue.

It doesn't dull but it deepens,
the jagged edge of longing
recedes into a panoramic vision
revealing God
at work in all the
corners.

Wrought iron love,
a mahogany nerve
giving into suffering
and pouring as smelted silver
into each and every
wounded
soul.

An erstwhile brush fire
now a searing, albeit
setting,
sun.

In retrospect

I made a mistake with you.
I should have let you love me
instead of chasing fireflies and fairy tales
when,
just like so many of us,
I just needed a good woman to straighten
me
out.

That demon may not have entered you
if I had acquiesced and sheltered you
or
seen you for the beautiful and fragile whisper that
you were in the full-throated shout of the city.

They found you pirouetting on the razor's edge of your walk up,
hearing whatever voices had come to you. I wonder
what they said that made you shut your ears?

That was the last I heard of you.

Now I sit in the bone yellow lamplight
looking for the pieces of you,
the shards of should-haves,
breadcrumbs of better times to
lead me back toward you.

But you deserve so much better than
that.

So tonight with
whatever surrounds you,
be it spouse, sorrow, or straightjacket,
wish on the brightest star in the sky
that you never
see me
again.

Stress writing in your anonymous online diary is the new black.

I used to call places home but they weren't.

Wherever one finds himself is mostly gravity mixed with circumstance.

Roots grow weakly in the shallows of where you plant them, you

don't belong anywhere because anywhere is

everywhere.

That being said...

North Carolina in April is as good a place as any
to be and the streets there
remember me so I
might as well form a reunion tour:

same old stage and
same old band.

I don't know how to feel.

I just wish I was still ignorant and innocent and
I didn't know anything about broken hearts or
bones.

I wonder if they'll call me forthcoming.

For a moment I fell for
a hawk-nosed vixen
named "whatever"
with skin and nails and eyes and
opinions.

I was blind drunk on the music and
getting high on her figure which
I could easily discern under her striped
long sleeve
crew neck.

Apparently we were a sold out crowd.

All those desperate faces,
clinging together and
terrified of being alone
yet wanting to give off
cool, nonchalant, and
artistic
vibes.

But I thought, "you know

there is no shame in finding yourself
or trying to" so
I didn't hate them -
but they sure aren't my tribe
anymore.

I do believe that I've transcended.

I'm not afraid of the grit and the
dirt of this thing and
I've got a taste for real rest so
let the next ones have
the
night.

But it was pretty nice to see Conor Oberst after all these gin-soaked
years.

Lay down,
back plane to the woodwork,
a craftsman tongue for your post-war groove.
Sawdust snatch,
tangerine crow's foot,
the hammer come to nail -
insert crude caulk joke here.

Oh what a gladitorial exercise,
I came to drive the point home darlin'
gonna make sure to change that gait!

Then one day suddenly
my soul will drop into you
to drown in scents and bathe in milk.

You'll grow ever deeper.

There will be no way to fill up the depths of your expanse;
you'll become an atonal song
that I'll briefly hum but
never give
words.

But relax,

I'll still fist twist those pigtails,
my fingers in your mouth,
good girl, tongue out, all of that thing...
just this time I'll know not to linger.

It seems the heart cools more quickly than
the bedsheet.

So go ahead:

I'll provide the service and

you charge by the

hour.

I like to remember things that never happened,
like bloodwine sunsets over Brooklyn
and our bodies in bare-footed
recline.
Hands clasped under blankets in innocent and ignorant
youth defiant,
a love story written in the most simple
and unassuming prose.
Something virgin in a harlot world
while around us the garbage and glamour
likewise dually
burn.

There was a time I craved an empire,
now I'd settle for a patch of land
a bit of honesty
and hours of
genuine discourse and
knowing
silences.

It doesn't look like I thought it would -

after all of our dreaming of where we would go and who we would be. Talking all night with our faces toward the ceiling, listening to your neighbors make newfound love while swearing our souls were fire.

But the future came heavily and we found out the truth: like the snail and salmon we are born to die. We'll bury our grandparents, our parents, and eventually, ourselves. Entire bloodlines that no one will ever hear about and whose obituaries will line the bottom of bird cages.

Being alive was never art, it was the tick of the time clock in the warehouse or cleaning the same dishes that you've cleaned one hundred times and you'll clean one hundred times more.

We are no gods, we are thieves.

We steal fragile moments, hiding them in frames so that we have something tangible, a signpost that reminds us why we keep making ourselves do it again.

We sign mortgages, adopt pets, have children, ask our bosses for a raise, plan weekend getaways, and write in the dark but there is still no end to the fathomless depth of loneliness that we feel as someone sleeps next to us who we care for but do not love.

"Love", that bastardized word that has been viciously twisted to fit into boxes of assorted confections and whose truest expression is impossible for us to attain. We are jealous, we are possessive, we project our fears and our insecurities onto one another and instead of adding our support and staying afloat, drag one another down endlessly as we struggle.

It doesn't look like I thought it would.

It doesn't look like a lyric. It doesn't look like a sunset. It doesn't look like a stolen glance out of the corner of your emerald eye.

It looks like our aging hands, pressed together in contrition, begging for mercy and to one day pass on in our sleep.